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VP3, Open Source Video at 200kbs
Honest Man
noted that intel is hyping VP3 as the first low bitrate open source video codec. 200kbs for VHS quality video sounds good to me, especially when I can apt-get it. But is DivX already to entrenched in this niche?
There are patents on the technology, which means it is of no more use to the open source community than True Type font hinting and MP3.
:)
I hope that they address the patent issues, and not just brush them aside like the DivX guys have done.
There's a reason the Xiph.org project is trying to develop a video codec too
The real open source VP3 site
The VP3 open source license
The VP3 license claims to be MPL derived. Would be interesting to see if it still fits the open source criteria.
I went to the VP3 site to watch some movie trailers they have. When I started playing the trailer, QuickTime Player told me I didn't have the VP3 codec and offered to install it for me. I clicked OK a few times and the trailer started playing. It couldn't have been easier. It even installed the encoder, so I can encode VP3 from any QuickTime app.
Lots of missed info for a project that whose source was released in early September. Good to see it finally got noticed by /.
-first source is available on vp3.com. You must register to download (hrm).
-Its license is MPL derived, with some restrictions on IP for their patents. Also derivatives must always be able to play VP3.
-Its streamable with QT hinting.
-only currently available for Win and Mac. Port to *nix should be easy since there is code for OS X.
-Apple and Real will be supporting it in their players
(yes, I suppose I should have spent a couple minutes searching on google before I posted my question).
I just found two comparisons:
Extreme Tech from June 18, 2001, compares Windows Media Video 3, 7 and 8, Real 8, MPEG-4, Sorenson MPEG-4, and QuickTime (Sorenson V3 and V2). Hard to get clear results, though it looks like they liked WMV and Real about the best.
Also, Digital Video.com (looks like it's from november) compares WMV8, Real 8, QT 5, Sorenson 3, H.263, VP3, and ZyGoVideo. Like many magazine articles, he declines to pick a "best", since it's so usage-dependant. He thought you needed to get to at least 800 kbps for VP3, didn't like ZyGo, liked Sorenson V3 better than H.263 (which he liked better than SV2), but thought WMV8 was better. Also RV8 wasn't as good, in his opinion, as WMV8.
Anyway, they might be worth a read...
And the results - for the same file, at 910 kbps, indistinguishable quality, both had minor artifacting, etc, but looked pretty good full screen, and looked great at default res. The big difference was time to encode - divx took 6 1/2 minutes to encode the clip I selected, VP3 took 11, and size - divx was 20.7 mb, vp3 was 29 mb. All other things were equal, I used Virtual Dub for both, same video clip, and the default encoding parameters for both (Medium for speed/quality in DivX 4.0, Fast Encode for VP3). My computer's a Celeron 566, 256mb RAM, running Windows 2000 SP2.
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